SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS

OF MBSR, SKILLFUL MEANS, AND THE

TROUBLE WITH MAPS

Jon Kabat-Zinn

The author recounts some of the early history of what is now known as MBSR, and its

relationship to mainstream medicine and the science of the mind/body connection and

health. He stresses the importance that MBSR and other mindfulness-based

interventions be grounded in a universal dharma understanding that is congruent

with Buddhadharma but not constrained by its historical, cultural and religious

manifestations associated with its counties of origin and their unique traditions. He

locates these developments within an historic confluence of two very different

epistemologies encountering each other for the first time, that of science and that of the

meditative traditions. The author addresses the ethical ground of MBSR, as well as

questions of lineage and of skillful ‘languaging’ and other means for maximizing the

possibility that the value of cultivating mindfulness in the largest sense can be heard and

embraced and cultivated in commonsensical and universal ways in secular settings.

He directly addresses mindfulness-based instructors on the subject of embodying and

drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts,

and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are

important to know to one degree or another as part of one’s own development. The

author’s perspective is grounded in what the Zen tradition refers to as the one thousand

year view. Although it is not stated explicitly in this text, he sees the current interest in

mindfulness and its applications as signaling a multi-dimensional emergence of great

transformative and liberative promise, one which, if cared for and tended, may give rise

to a flourishing on this planet akin to a second, and this time global, Renaissance, for the

benefit of all sentient beings and our world.

As I will recount a bit further along, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)

was developed as one of a possibly infinite number of skillful means for bringing

the dharma into mainstream settings.1 It has never been about MBSR for its own

sake. It has always been about the M. And the M is a very big M, as I attempt to

describe in this paper.

That said, the quality of MBSR as an intervention is only as good as the MBSR

instructor and his or her understanding of what is required to deliver a truly

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, No. 1, May 2011ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/11/010281-306

q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2011.564844

mindfulness-based programme. Much of what is said here, both in this paper, and in

the entire issue of the journal is meant to reinforce our collective inquiry into what is

involved in maintaining the highest standards of understanding and practice in

delivering such programmes in the years ahead, given the exponential rise in

interest and activity in this burgeoning field and its attendant risks and

opportunities. By necessity, the perspective offered here is inevitably personal,

shaped by my own experience over the past four decades. I offer it in the hope that

it will prove useful to others and also to further dialogue concerning the meanings

and essence of mindfulness, its value and promise in the wider world, the pitfalls

attendant with such aspirations, and the challenges we face individually and

collectively in the future in developing novel and hopefully skillful avenues and

vehicles for moving the bell curve of our society toward greater sanity and

wellbeing. In this sense, MBSR was conceived of and functions as a public health

intervention, a vehicle for both individual and societal transformation.

When I wrote Full Catastrophe Living, nine years after starting the Stress

Reduction Clinic, it was very important to me that it capture the essence and spirit

of the MBSR curriculum as it unfolds for our patients. At the same time, I wanted it

to articulate the dharma that underlies the curriculum, but without ever using the

word ‘Dharma’ or invoking Buddhist thought or authority, since for obvious

reasons, we do not teach MBSR in that way. My intention and hope was that the

book might embody to whatever degree possible the dharma essence of the

Buddha’s teachings put into action and made accessible to mainstream Americans

facing stress, pain, and illness. This is plainly stated in the Introduction, where I did

not shy away from explicitly stating its Buddhist origins. However, from the

beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to structure it and find ways to speak

about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist,

‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey.’ To my mind this was a constant

and serious risk that would have undermined our attempts to present it as

commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate

element of mainstream medical care. This was something of an ongoing

challenge, given that the entire curriculum is based on relatively (for novices)

intensive training and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga

pretty much defined one element of the ‘New Age.’

Before the book was published, I asked a number of colleagues that I

respected to endorse it. Among those I asked was Thich Nhat Hanh, whom I didn’t

know at the time except through his writings, and in particular, his little book, The

Miracle of Mindfulness (Hanh 1975), which had a certain plainness and simplicity to

it that I admired. In this case, more than hoping for any kind of endorsement, I

thought I would simply share with him the direction we were taking and get his

sense of it. I didn’t actually expect a response. However, he did respond, and

offered a statement that I felt showed that he had grasped the essence of the

book and the line it was trying to walk. What’s more, he expressed it in such an

elegant and affirming way that I felt it was a gift, and that it would be disrespectful,

having asked for it, not to use it. However, I did think twice about it. It precipitated

282 JON KABAT-ZINN

something of a crisis in me for a time, because not only was Thich Nhat Hanh

definitely a Buddhist authority, his brief endorsement used the very foreign word

dharma not once, but four times. Yet what he said spoke deeply and directly to the

essence of the original vision and intention of MBSR. I wondered: ‘Is this the right

time for this? Would it be skillful to stretch the envelope at this point? Or would it

in the end cause more harm than good?’ In retrospect, these concerns now sound

a bit silly to me. But at the time, they felt significant.

At the same time, I found myself pondering whether such concerns might not

have become a bit outmoded by then. Perhaps by 1990 there was no longer such a

strong distinction between the so-called New Age and the mainstream world. So

many different so-called counter-cultural strands had penetrated the dominant

culture by then that it was hard to make any binary distinctions about what was

mainstream and what was fringe. Advertising alone was materializing and

commercializing everything, exploiting even yoga and meditation for its own ends.

In the process, it was breaking down conventional stereotypes while simultaneously

creating new ones. The world was shifting rapidly, even before the impending global

emergence of the internet with its constantly accelerating onslaught of information

and its effects on our minds and our pace of life. Perhaps there was no longer as big a

risk of our work being identified with a ‘lunatic fringe.’ Perhaps there was already

enough evidence in support of the efficacy of MBSR to open the door at least a bit

to expanding the ways in which I could articulate its origins and its essence—not so

much to the patients, but to the growing number of health professionals becoming

interested in mindfulness and its clinical applications. Perhaps it was important to

be more explicit about why it might be valuable to bring a universal dharma

perspective and means of cultivating it into the mainstream world.2

And so, in the end, I decided to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s words and to put

them up front, with his permission, as the preface to the book. It was a simple

extension of something I had already been doing for many years when giving

lectures (at medical and psychiatry grand rounds) at medical centres around the

country, as well as in public talks. In the mid 1980s I had begun using a series of

slides that included a photograph of the great Buddha statue in Kamakura, Japan,

and finding simple and matter-of-fact ways to articulate for professional and lay

audiences the origins and essence of those teachings—how the Buddha himself

was not a Buddhist, how the word ‘Buddha’ means one who has awakened, and

how mindfulness, often spoken of as ‘the heart of Buddhist meditation,’ has little

or nothing to do with Buddhism per se, and everything to do with wakefulness,

compassion, and wisdom. These are universal qualities of being human, precisely

what the word dharma, is pointing to. The word has many meanings, but can be

understood primarily as signifying both the teachings of the Buddha and the

lawfulness of things in relationship to suffering and the nature of the mind.

Now, more than 30 years after the founding of the Stress Reduction Clinic,

the very existence of this special issue, as well as so many other interfaces at which

such conversations and studies are taking place (see Kabat-Zinn and Davidson

2011), is evidence that a deeper conversation, coupled with increasingly robust

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 283

scientific investigations, is ensuing. We can observe an accelerating confluence of

dharma with mainstream medicine, healthcare, cognitive science, affective

neuroscience, neuroeconomics, business, leadership, primary and secondary

education, higher education, the law, indeed, in society as a whole, in this now

very rapidly changing world. Such developments have major implications, of course,

for the kinds of training required to skillfully deliver mindfulness-based interventions

in a range of different environments without omitting or denaturing their dharma

essence. We shall return to this question in the final section of this paper.

By now, everybody is familiar with the graphs that show the exponential rise

in the number of scientific papers each year on the subject of mindfulness (see

Introduction, Figure 1). It is profoundly gratifying that a whole family of what are

now called mindfulness-based interventions, such as MBCT, MBRP, MBCP, MB-EAT,

MBEC3 and many more have developed for specific purposes and are making

profound and continually expanding contributions to the alleviation of suffering

and to our deepening understanding of the nature of the human mind and heart.

For our work to be most skillful, it is important for us to inquire deeply into

the inevitable limitations of our individual perspectives and to articulate the

tension, mystery, and potential for continually deepening our understanding and

furthering the evolution of our collective interests and activities on the basis of the

kinds of perspectives expressed by the contributors to this special issue.

It is my hope that people attracted to this field will come to appreciate the

profound transformative potential of the dharma in its most universal and skillful

articulations through their own meditation training and practice. Mindfulness can

only be understood from the inside out. It is not one more cognitive-behavioural

technique to be deployed in a behaviour change paradigm, but a way of being and

a way of seeing that has profound implications for understanding the nature of our

own minds and bodies, and for living life as if it really mattered (Kabat-Zinn 2003). It

is primarily what Francisco Varela termed a first-person experience. Without that

living foundation, none of what really matters is available to us in ways that are

maximally healing, transformative, compassionate, and wise. Of course, ultimately

there is no inside and no outside, only one seamless whole, awake and aware.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in

time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something

separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This

delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to

affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from

this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures

and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely,

but the striving for such attainment is in itself a part of the liberation, and a

foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein

New York Times, March 29, 1972

284 JON KABAT-ZINN

Motivation

As I reflect on it now, from the very beginning there was for me one primary

and compelling reason for attempting to bring mindfulness into the mainstream

of society. That was to relieve suffering and catalyse greater compassion and

wisdom in our lives and culture. In my view, it is still the primary benefit that will

accrue to us if the momentum continues, and the investigation and adaptation of

mindfulness writ large (see below for what I mean by this) succeeds in maintaining

its full depth, integrity, and potential. However, the mystery of how this came

about, or how anything comes about, is in some sense opaque. Even having

played a role in its unfolding, I find the indeterminacy and impersonal yet very

personal nature of it mysterious. What is more, I am not sure it can be told entirely

accurately as one fixed and definitive story or pathway—it strikes me as requiring

a set of Feynman diagrams of various recollected trajectories. One would need to

sum over all the stories, memories, records, and artefacts from that time to even

approximate the actual truth of things. I love that.

It certainly wouldn’t be summing over just my life, and just my memories

either, but over the lives and memories and relationships and yearnings of my

colleagues and friends who came to be involved in the early years of the Stress

Reduction Clinic, as well as the stories and pathways of all the people far and wide

who are now engaged in one way or another in working at the various interfaces

that this special issue of the journal represents. As I see it, we are all participants in

this mysterious unfolding process that may actually have no precise beginning, and

no end either. The various involvements, participation, and caring on the part of the

contributors to this issue and of our colleagues near and far, and on the part of the

readers of this issue imply that we all carry some degree of responsibility for the

integrity of the dharma as it is reflected in our lives and work. That, it seems to me, is

the best way to keep it alive and to guard its integrity and vitality, by carrying it in

our own individual hearts in our own individual ways, which we share as colleagues

and as a distributive global sangha of overlapping, if not entirely commonly shared

perspectives, concerns, and purpose. I sometimes describe this interconnectedness

as Indra’s Net at work (Kabat-Zinn 1999). It may be an apt metaphor for the

interconnectedness of the universe, but its essence remains deliciously mysterious.

In what follows, I offer a few of the narrative threads that have been

important to me in pondering the unfolding of MBSR and which reflect the

distributive and multiplicative elements that give it value—for myself and for

many others, priceless value. It will be a non-linear, impressionistic, somewhat

reflective recounting of these various threads. Perhaps, taken together in the spirit

in which they are offered, they may come into focus and illuminate some of the

larger themes and challenges we are facing in the rapidly growing field of

mindfulness-based interventions and their roles in medicine, psychology, science,

and the wider society.

In addition to the primary motivation discussed above, there were a number

of secondary motivations that drew me to pursue this path. These included its

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 285

potential for elucidating and deepening our understanding of the mind/body

connection via new dimensions of scientific investigation, and also, the possibility

of developing a form of right livelihood for myself at a particular juncture in my

life, as well as, if successful, right livelihood for possibly large numbers of others

who would be drawn to work of this kind because of its potential depth and

authenticity. And there was also the fact of being in love with the beauty,

simplicity, and universality of the dharma, and coming to see it as a worthy and

meaningful pathway for a life well lived, a life of devotion to the potential for

awakening and the alleviation of suffering, and thus, full circle to the original

motivation.

Envisioning the possible

I started what was originally called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation

Program in September 1979. It didn’t come out of a vacuum . . . there were many

years of pondering and meditating and inward and outward wandering before it

arose as a possibility in my mind. Once established in the hospital, within a few

years, it got renamed the Stress Reduction Clinic to normalize it by emphasizing

that it was a clinical service, like any other, in the Department of Medicine. We

were proud of the brand new hospital signs that pointed the way to our clinic, one

small indicator of having blended into the mainstream of healthcare. Later, as

more and more programmes started forming based on our work, we came to

speak of our work in a more generic form as MBSR, or mindfulness-based stress

reduction. From the start, it was motivated by a strong impulse on my part, as

recounted below, to bring my dharma practice together with my work life into

one unified whole, as an expression of right livelihood and in the service of

something useful that felt very much needed in the world.

Even as a graduate student at MIT (1964 –1971), I had been pondering for

years ‘what is my job with a capital J,’ my ‘karmic assignment’ on the planet, so to

speak, without coming up with much of anything. It was a personal koan for me

and became more and more a continuous thread in my life day and night as those

years unfolded. ‘What am I supposed to be doing with my life?’ I kept asking

myself. ‘What do I love so much I would pay to do it?’ I knew it wasn’t to continue

in a career in molecular biology, much as I loved science and knew I would be

disappointing my Nobel Laureate thesis advisor at MIT, Salvador Luria, and my

father, himself an accomplished scientist. I was first exposed to the dharma at MIT,

of all improbable places, in 1966, and started a daily meditation practice from that

point on (Kabat-Zinn 2005a, 2005b). Meanwhile, I did what I could to find work,

especially after I was married and, with my wife, Myla, had started a family. That

included two years as a faculty member in the Biology Department at Brandeis

University teaching molecular genetics and a science for non-science majors

course (which was an opportunity for teaching meditation and yoga as pathways

into a first-person experience of biology), and then a stint as Director of the

Cambridge Zen Center under the Korean Zen Master, Seung Sahn, where I was

286 JON KABAT-ZINN

also his student and a Dharma teacher in training. I was also teaching large

mindful yoga classes weekly in a church in Harvard Square, and exploring other

things, such as offering occasional meditation training and yoga/stretching

workshops for athletes, especially runners.

In 1976, I went to work at the almost brand-new University of Massachusetts

Medical School.4 All the while, my koan about what I was really supposed to be

doing with my life in terms of right livelihood was unfolding in the background.

On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in

Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room one

afternoon about Day 10 of the retreat, I had a ‘vision’ that lasted maybe 10

seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was rich in detail

and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and

their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought stream, but rather

something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully explain and don’t feel

the need to.

I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the long-

term implications of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be

implemented in one test environment—namely that it would spark new fields of

scientific and clinical investigation, and would spread to hospitals and medical

centres and clinics across the country and around the world, and provide right

livelihood for thousands of practitioners. Because it was so weird, I hardly ever

mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better

sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I decided

to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could.

Pretty much everything I saw in that 10 seconds has come to pass, in large

measure because of the work and the love of all the people who found their way

to the Stress Reduction Clinic once it was born, wanting to contribute their own

unique karmic trajectories and loves to the nascent and then continually unfolding

enterprise of MBSR, the wellbeing and longevity of which were always in

some sense tentative and uncertain, because of the vagaries of medical school

and hospital politics (one foot on a roller skate, the other on a banana peel,

I used to say).

It struck me in that fleeting moment that afternoon at the Insight Meditation

Society that it would be a worthy work to simply share the essence of meditation

and yoga practices as I had been learning and practicing them at that point for 13

years, with those who would never come to a place like IMS or a Zen Center, and

who would never be able to hear it through the words and forms that were being

used at meditation centres, or even, back in those days, at yoga centres, which

were few and far-between, and very foreign as well.

A flood of thoughts following the extended moment filled in the picture.

Why not try to make meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn

to it? Why not develop an American5 vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the

matter, and didn’t focus on the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which the

dharma emerged, however beautiful they might be, or on centuries-old scholarly

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 287

debates concerning fine distinctions in the Abhidharma. This was not because

they weren’t ultimately important, but because they would likely cause

unnecessary impediments for people who were basically dealing with suffering

and seeking some kind of release from it. And, why not do it in the hospital of the

medical centre where I happened to be working at the time? After all, hospitals do

function as ‘dukkha magnets’ in our society,6 pulling for stress, pain of all kinds,

disease and illness, especially when they have reached levels where it is impossible

to ignore them (Kabat-Zinn 2005c). What better place than a hospital to make the

dharma available to people in ways that they might possibly understand it and be

inspired by a heartfelt and practical invitation to explore whether it might not be

possible to do something for themselves as a complement to their more traditional

medical treatments, since the entire raison d’etre of the dharma is to elucidate the

nature of suffering and its root causes, as well as provide a practical path to

liberation from suffering? All this to be undertaken, of course, without ever

mentioning the word ‘dharma.’

The early years

With the aim of bridging these two epistemologies of science and dharma,

I felt impelled to point out in the early years of MBSR the obvious etymological

linkage of the words medicine and meditation and articulate for medical audiences

their root meanings (Bohm 1980; Kabat-Zinn 1990). In that context, it felt useful to

adopt the already established terminology of self-regulation (Shapiro 1980) and

describe meditation operationally, in terms of the self-regulation of attention

(Goleman and Schwartz 1976). From there, it was commonsensical, if not

axiomatic, to point out that much of the time we are barely present in our own

bodies and lives as they are unfolding, and so have not cultivated interior

resources available to us that might be of profound benefit . . . such as the wise,

discerning, embodied, and selfless aspects of awareness itself. The intention and

approach behind MBSR were never meant to exploit, fragment, or decontextualize

the dharma, but rather to recontextualize it within the frameworks of science,

medicine (including psychiatry and psychology), and healthcare so that it would

be maximally useful to people who could not hear it or enter into it through the

more traditional dharma gates, whether they were doctors or medical patients,

hospital administrators, or insurance companies.

And because naming is very important in how things are understood and

either accepted or not, I felt that the entire undertaking needed to be held by an

umbrella term broad enough to contain the multiplicity of key elements that

seemed essential to field a successful clinical programme in the cultural climate of

1979. Stress reduction seemed ideal, since pretty much everybody can relate to

that instinctively, even though ‘reduction’ is a something of a misnomer. The term

stress also has the element of dukkha embedded within it. In fact, some Buddhist

scholars translate the term ‘dukkha’ in Buddhist texts as ‘stress’ (see, for example,

Thanissaro Bhikkhu 2010). Moreover, there was already a growing literature

288 JON KABAT-ZINN

related to the psychophysiology of stress reactivity and pain regulation (Goleman

and Schwartz 1976; Melzack and Perry 1975; Schwartz, Davidson and Goleman

1978). But as more than one participant in MBSR has exclaimed on occasion after a

few weeks in the programme: ‘This isn’t stress reduction. This is my whole life!’

New evidence in fact demonstrates that chronic stress exerts potentially

deleterious health effects on the brain, on one’s behaviour, and on cognitive

abilities across the entire lifespan, with particular windows of heightened

vulnerability (Lupien et al. 2009). Chronic stress has also been shown by Nobel

Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn to increase the rate of degradation of the telomers at

the ends of all of our chromosomes, and thus accelerate biological aging at the

cellular and sub-cellular level, leading to a significant shortening of the lifespan

(Epel et al. 2004).

As things developed, it increasingly felt that something more was needed to

differentiate our approach from many programmes that also used the term stress

reduction or stress management but that had no dharma foundation whatsoever.

So at a certain point in the early 1990s, it seemed sensible to formally begin calling

what we were doing mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) although, in

point of fact, we had been referring to what we did as training in ‘mindfulness

meditation’ from the very beginning in the scientific papers coming out of the

Stress Reduction Clinic (Kabat-Zinn 1982; Kabat-Zinn and Chapman-Waldrop 1988;

Kabat-Zinn, Lipworth, and Burney 1985; Kabat-Zinn et al. 1986). The term mind-

fulness meditation had already been used several times in the psychological

literature (Brown and Engler 1980; Deatherage 1975).

The early papers on MBSR cited not just its Theravada roots (Kornfield 1977;

Nyanaponika 1962), but also its Mahayana roots within both the Soto (Suzuki

1970) and Rinzai (Kapleau 1965) Zen traditions (and by lineage, the earlier Chinese

and Korean streams), as well as certain currents from the yogic traditions (Thakar

1977) including Vedanta (Nisargadatta 1973), and the teachings of J Krishnamurti

(Krishnamurti 1969, 1979) and Ramana Maharshi (Maharshi 1959). My own primary

Zen teacher, Seung Sahn, was Korean, and taught both Soto and Rinzai

approaches, including the broad use and value of koans and koan-based ‘Dharma

combat’ exchanges between teacher and student (Seung Sahn 1976). This form

contributed in part to the element of interactive moment-by-moment exchanges

in the classroom between teacher and participant in which they explore together

in great and sometimes challenging detail direct first-person experience of the

practice and its manifestations in everyday life. This salient feature of MBSR and

other mindfulness-based interventions has come to be called ‘inquiry’ or

dialogue7 (Kabat-Zinn 2005d; Ocok 2007; Williams et al. 2007).

Some works not cited in the early papers but that made a significant

impression on my appreciation of the dharma at that time and how it could be

articulated in a simple and colloquial vocabulary included Meditation in Action

(Trungpa 1969), The Miracle of Mindfulness (Hanh 1976), and The Experience of

Insight (Goldstein 1976). Early studies that helped contextualize the work of MBSR

within the nascent framework of scientific research into meditation and its

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 289

potential clinical applications included the early papers of Dan Goleman and

Richard Davidson (Davidson and Schwartz 1976; Goleman and Schwartz 1976); the

work of Benson (Benson 1976), and the work of Roger Walsh, including his seminal

1980 paper (Walsh 1977, 1978, 1980).

Naming what we were doing in the clinic mindfulness-based stress reduction

raises a number of questions. One is the wisdom of using the word mindfulness

intentionally as an umbrella term to describe our work and to link it explicitly with

what I have always considered to be a universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not

identical, with the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhadharma. By ‘umbrella

term’ I mean that it is used in certain contexts as a place-holder for the entire

dharma, that it is meant to carry multiple meanings and traditions simultaneously,

not in the service of finessing and confounding real differences, but as a potentially

skillful means for bringing the streams of alive, embodied dharma understanding

and of clinical medicine together. The intention was for it to be commonsensically

relevant and accessible enough to benefit potentially anybody who might be

overwhelmed by suffering and sufficiently motivated to undertake a certain degree

of hard work in the form of a daily mindfulness practice in the ‘laboratories’ of the

MBSR programme and of life itself. The challenge for the participants was to just do

the work from week to week, in other words, to practice the curriculum as it was

being unfolded, and see what would happen. The emphasis was always on

awareness of the present moment and acceptance of things as they are, however

they are in actuality, rather than a preoccupation with attaining a particular desired

outcome at some future time, no matter how desirable it might be (see Cullen 2006,

2008). One major principle that we committed to was, and still is, never asking more

of our patients in terms of daily practice than we as instructors were prepared to

commit to in our own lives on a daily basis.

It always felt that the details concerning the use of the word mindfulness in

the various contexts in which we were deploying it could be worked out later by

scholars and researchers who were knowledgeable in this area, and interested in

making such distinctions and resolving important issues that may have been

confounded and compounded by the early but intentional ignoring or glossing

over of potentially important historical, philosophical, and cultural nuances—

issues that may yet be shown to be critical to a deeper understanding of the mind

and its relationship to the brain and body, as is implied in many of the papers in

this volume, as well as a deeper understanding of the dharma itself, as the subject

is excavated so elegantly and eloquently in the scholarly papers in this issue from

various classical Buddhist perspectives. This special issue is perhaps only a first

step to just the kind of dialogue necessary to remind us all of the need for both

fidelity and imagination in furthering the work of the dharma in the world in an

ever-widening circle of settings and circumstances, including business, leadership,

education, etc.

In the early years, I did find great support for the direction I was taking in the

writings of Nyanaponika Thera (1962) and in particular, what I thought of at the

290 JON KABAT-ZINN

time, and still do, as an extremely elegant encapsulation of the centrality of

mindfulness. In his words, Mindfulness, then, is

the unfailing master key for knowing the mind, and is thus the starting point;

the perfect tool for shaping the mind, and is thus the focal point;

the lofty manifestation of the achieved freedom of the mind, and is thus the

culminating point.

Seen in this way, mindfulness is the view, the path, and the fruit all in one.

I also felt that it was more important to describe mindfulness in considerable

detail in the early scientific papers on MBSR and cite its various origins in various

contemplative traditions, rather than to offer a definitive and concise definition.

And when I did offer definitions of mindfulness, as I did repeatedly in professional

talks, and later, in books, they were operational definitions, not meant to be

definitive statements in absolute accord with the Abhidharma or any other

classical teaching that tended to limit it to the mind state that knows and

remembers whether or not the attention is on the selected object of attention, or

any other aspects of remembering, as described in this volume by a number of

contributors (Dreyfus, Gethin, Olendzki). My training in Zen consistently

emphasized non-dual awareness transcending subject and object, akin to what

John Dunne refers to in this issue as an innatist perspective, and what I believe

Nyanaponika meant by the ‘lofty manifestation of the achieved freedom of the

mind.’ What seemed called for, practically speaking, was an instrumental and

operational emphasis on what is actually involved in the gesture of awareness, to

use Francisco Varela’s elegant phrase (Depraz, Varela and Vermesch 1999; Varela,

Thompson and Rosch 1991). Thus, several variants of oft-quoted working

definitions were expressed at different times: (a) paying attention in a particular

way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally (Kabat-Zinn

1994); (b) the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the

present moment, and non-judgmentally (Kabat-Zinn 2005e). No single definition

of mindfulness was given in Full Catastrophe Living. Instead, I chose to describe it

operationally from many different angles depending on context. In some sense,

the entire book is a definition of mindfulness.

On the issue of ‘memory’ as an intrinsic element of sati, I have always felt

that one natural function of present moment awareness is to remember the

immediate past. Thus, the element of retention that Georges Dreyfus emphasizes

in his paper did not seem either necessary or useful to feature in a working

definition of mindfulness in the West, given how cognitive we tend to be already,

and how little we experience the domain of being (in the present moment)

without any agenda other than to be awake and without the lenses of our likes

and dislikes and opinions, which are usually colouring and filtering direct

experience. Thus, the strong emphasis on non-judgmental awareness in the

operational definitions. Non-judgmental does not mean to imply to the novice

practitioner that there is some ideal state in which judgments no longer arise.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 291

Rather, it points out that there will be many many judgments and opinions arising

from moment to moment, but that we do not have to judge or evaluate or react to

any of what arises, other than perhaps recognizing it in the moment of arising as

pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (the second foundation or establishment of

mindfulness). This can lead naturally to the directly experienced discovery that the

liberative choice in any moment either to cling and self-identify or not is always

available, always an option, and perhaps to a further discovery that non-clinging

sometimes happens spontaneously through the intrinsic liberative quality of pure

awareness, with no effort whatsoever.

For this reason, and a personal affinity with the various streams of Chan and

Zen, there was from the very beginning of MBSR an emphasis on non-duality and

the non-instrumental dimension of practice, and thus, on non-doing, non-striving,

not-knowing, non-attachment to outcomes, even to positive health outcomes,

and on investigating beneath name and form and the world of appearances, as

per the teachings of the Heart Sutra, which highlight the intrinsically empty nature

of even the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and liberation itself and yet

are neither nihilistic nor positivistic, but a middle way (see Kabat-Zinn 2003, 2005f;

Wallace and Hodel 2008). The emphasis in Chan on direct transmission outside the

sutras or orthodox teachings (Luk 1974) also reinforced the sense that what is

involved in mindfulness practice is ultimately not merely a matter of the intellect

or cognition or scholarship, but of direct authentic full-spectrum first-person

experience, nurtured, catalysed, reinforced and guided by the second-person

perspective of a well-trained and highly experienced and empathic teacher.

Therefore, MBSR was grounded in a non-authoritarian, non-hierarchical

perspective that allowed for clarity, understanding, and wisdom, what we might

call essential dharma, to emerge in the interchanges between instructor and

participants, and within the meditation practice of the participant as guided by

the instructor. And indeed, quite intentionally, we give a great deal of guidance in

the meditation practices of MBSR in the early weeks of the programme, in class

and on the guided meditation CDs.

A concrete example of the middle way orientation in MBSR can be felt in the

way the instructor relates to the participants and to the entire enterprise.

Although our patients all come with various problems, diagnoses, and ailments,

we make every effort to apprehend their intrinsic wholeness. We often say that

from our perspective, as long as you are breathing, there is more ‘right’ with you

than ‘wrong’ with you, no matter what is wrong. In this process, we make every

effort to treat each participant as a whole human being rather than as a patient, or

a diagnosis, or someone having a problem that needs fixing. MBSR is grounded

altogether in a non-fixing orientation and approach. It is less about curing and

more about healing, which I define as a coming to terms with things as they are in

full awareness. We often see that healing takes place on its own over time as we

align ourselves with what is deepest and best in ourselves and rest in awareness

moment by moment without an attachment to outcome. Or, alternatively and in

all probability, seeing and not judging, to whatever degree possible, how strongly

292 JON KABAT-ZINN

we are attached to a particular outcome, and then bringing that quality of

awareness into all aspects of our lives, work, and relationships as best we can.

The fact that attending in this way with consistency and stability is actually

the hardest work in the world for human beings doesn’t make it any less attractive

or important. We might say that if mindfulness does not in some sense become

our default mode, then its opposite, mindlessness or unawareness, will certainly

retain that role. The inevitable result is to be caught up in a great many of our

moments in a reactive, robotic, automatic pilot mode that has the potential

to easily consume and colour our entire life and virtually all our relationships.

One of the major discoveries of MBSR is that our patients realize this in dramatic

ways and become motivated to live a life of greater awareness that extends far

beyond the eight weeks they are in the programme. That greater awareness

includes, of course, our intrinsic interconnectedness as beings, and so the

possibility of greater spontaneous compassion toward others and toward oneself.

For many, it also includes formal meditation becoming an ongoing feature of

one’s daily life, often for years and decades after the initial experience of MBSR.

MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions modeled on it are

intrinsically a participatory engagement . . .we invite the patient to participate in

his or her own movement toward greater levels of health and wellbeing, starting

from the actuality of the present circumstance, whatever it might be. It is

invitational, and depends on the patient’s willingness to tap into those profound

innate resources we all have by virtue of being human, the capacities for learning,

growing, healing, and transformation inherent in the systematic cultivation of

awareness itself and its sequelae. We think of this as participatory medicine at its

best: the healthcare team brings its resources to the table, and the patient/

participant brings his or hers as well (Kabat-Zinn 2000). We pour energy, in the

form of attention, into what is ‘right with us’ in the present moment (which

requires recognition that there may indeed be something ‘right’ with us) and let

the rest of the hospital and the healthcare team take care of what is ‘wrong.’ It is a

worthy division of labour, and a good place to start the process of reclaiming the

full dimensionality of one’s being and embodying it in everyday life, whatever else

one might have to come to terms with, all of which is an intimate part of ‘the

curriculum’ of the practice in any event.

In the Spring of 1979, after the vision I experienced on the retreat at IMS,

I met individually with three physicians in the hospital, the directors of the primary

care, pain, and orthopedic clinics, to try to find out how they viewed their work,

what their clinics’ successes were with their patients, and what might be missing

in the hospital experience, both for their patients and for themselves. When I

asked what percentage of their patients they felt they were able to help, the

response was typically 10–20%. I was astonished, and asked what happened to

the others. I was told that they either got better on their own, or never got better.

So I asked whether they would be open to referring their patients, when

appropriate, to a programme that would teach them to take better care of

themselves as a complement to whatever the healthcare system was or was not

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 293

able to do for them. It would be based on relatively intensive training in Buddhist

meditation without the Buddhism (as I liked to put it), and yoga. Their responses

were very positive. On the basis of those meetings, I proposed that a programme

be set up under the auspices of ambulatory care in the hospital, which would take

the form of an eight-week course to which physicians would refer patients they

were seeing who they felt were not responding to their treatments, and were in

some sense, falling through the cracks of the healthcare system (really in large

measure a disease-care system) and not getting any or full satisfaction from their

healthcare. And so, MBSR came into being in the Fall of 1979, and those first three

very forward thinking clinic directors, Tom Winters, Bob Burney and John

J. Monahan exclusively referred the first few cycles of patients until word spread

further into the medical community within the hospital and then out into the

larger medical community as well. Within the year, the Chief of Medicine, James

E. Dalen, suggested it become part of the Department of Medicine. We were

invited wholeheartedly into the mainstream. This was before the new signs went

up in the hospital, of course.8

Ethics

The question is sometimes raised about the ethical foundation of MBSR.

Are we ignoring that fundamental aspect of the Dharma in favour of just a few

highly selected meditation techniques, again, decontextualizing elements of a

coherent whole? My view is that we are not. First, it is inevitably the personal

responsibility of each person engaging in this work to attend with care and

intentionality to how we are actually living our lives, both personally and

professionally, in terms of ethical behaviour. An awareness of one’s conduct and

the quality of one’s relationships, inwardly and outwardly, in terms of their

potential to cause harm, are intrinsic elements of the cultivation of mindfulness as

I am describing it here.

At the same time, it seems to me that an ethical foundation is naturally built

into the structure and setting of MBSR in a number of different ways. For instance,

within the context of medicine and healthcare, we already have in place a

profound framework and professional code of conduct in the Hippocratic

tradition, founded on the principle of primum non nocere, to first do no harm, and

to put the needs of the patient above one’s own. Such principles are axiomatic

and foundational within the context of MBSR, whether it is offered in a hospital

setting, or elsewhere. Of course, a degree of mindfulness is required even to sense

that one might actually be doing harm, either by commission or, more subtly, by

omission.

We also encourage a work environment in the clinic and the Center for

Mindfulness in which we depend not only on our own awareness but also on each

other’s awareness, candour, and willingness to communicate about challenging

circumstances to keep us individually and collectively honest. It is built into the

fabric of how we see our work and commitment to our patients, our colleagues,

294 JON KABAT-ZINN

and ourselves. Moreover, as noted earlier (see note 6), the Hippocratic Oath in

some sense is mirrored in the Bodhisattva Vow to attend completely to the

suffering and liberation of an infinite number of beings before attending to one’s

own. From the non-dual perspective, the infinite number of beings and oneself are

not separate, and never were. This perspective can and needs to be taken

seriously, and gently supported by explicit intentions regarding how we conduct

ourselves both inwardly and outwardly.

In this way, and also for cultural reasons having to do with how common it is

in our society to profess a moral stance outwardly that one does not adhere to

inwardly, it feels appropriate in our environment that the ethical foundation of the

practice be more implicit than explicit, and that it may be best expressed,

supported, and furthered by how we, the MBSR instructor and the entire staff of

the clinic, embody it in our own lives and in how we relate to the patients, the

doctors, the hospital staff, everybody, and of course, how we relate to our own

interior experience. Ultimately, the responsibility to live an ethical life lies on the

shoulders and in the hearts of each one of us who chooses to engage in the work

of mindfulness-based interventions. It too is a distributive Dharma responsibility.

And the first line of defence in terms of potential transgression or betrayal is

always awareness of one’s own motivations and emotions, and the universal

tendencies of grasping, aversion, delusion, and ‘selfing’ which can so easily colour

our moments and blind us to root causes of suffering that we might be

participating in unwittingly.

It has always felt to me that MBSR is at its healthiest and best when the

responsibility to ensure its integrity, quality, and standards of practice is being

carried by each MBSR instructor him or herself. That is not to turn it into an ideal or a

burden, but rather to keep it very real and close to our everyday experience held in

awareness with kindness and discernment. In my experience, which is certainly

limited and circumscribed, the shouldering and embodiment of this responsibility

has been the case with MBSR teachers around the world to an extraordinary degree.

To my mind, when each of us who cares about this work, who loves this work, takes

care of the dharma through our practice and our love, then the dharma that is at

the heart of the work flourishes and takes care of itself. Tended by each member of

the Sangha of instructors, practitioners, researchers, everybody . . . it defines a

distributive responsibility that turns out to be a great joy and a continued invitation

to have there be no separation between one’s practice and one’s life. Some

mindfulness teachers who are also physicians have characterized this stance as the

foundation of professionalism in medicine, and boldly point out its potential for

developing a more compassionate and less stressed and error-prone healthcare

system (Epstein 1999; Krasner et al. 2009; Sibinga and Wu 2010).

Lineagesand training for teachersofmindfulness-based interventions

The early years of MBSR and the development of other mindfulness-based

clinical interventions were the province of a small group of people who gave

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 295

themselves over to practicing and teaching mindfulness basically out of love, out

of passion for the practice, knowingly and happily putting their careers and

economic wellbeing at risk because of that love, usually stemming from deep

first-person encounters with the dharma and its meditative practices, usually

through studying with Buddhist teachers from well-defined traditions and

lineages, and/or Asian teachers in other traditions that value the wisdom of

mindfulness, such as Sufism, the yogas, Vedanta, and Taoism. Fortunately, there

are even more options in this era, for those who wish to pursue them, to study

and practice with such respected teachers in the root traditions of Asia, as well as

with seasoned Western Buddhist Dharma teachers, and, of course, to sit long

retreats at wonderful Dharma centres both in Asia and in the West.9 I personally

consider the periodic sitting of relatively long (at least 7 – 10 days and

occasionally much longer) teacher-led retreats to be an absolute necessity in the

developing of one’s own meditation practice, understanding, and effectiveness

as a teacher. In terms of the ‘curriculum’ of mindfulness training, to become an

MBSR teacher, it is a laboratory requirement. But while participating in periodic

long retreats may be necessary and extremely important for one’s own

development and understanding, by itself it is not sufficient. Mindfulness in

everyday life is the ultimate challenge and practice. Of course, the two are

complementary and mutually reinforcing and deepening. And once again, we

can remind ourselves that ultimately there is no separation between them,

because life itself is one seamless whole.

The practice of mindfulness is a lifetime’s engagement. Growth,

development, and maturation as a mindfulness practitioner and teacher of

mindfulness are a critical part of the process. It is not always painless. As we know

from direct experience, self-awareness can be exceedingly humbling. Thus, the

motivation to persevere and face what needs facing and work with it wisely and

compassionately must mature as well in the process. This brings us to some critical

concerns regarding the teaching of mindfulness in non-Buddhist settings and the

mental models or maps that instructors of mindfulness-based interventions might

use to navigate by in those settings.

The trouble with maps–a note to mindfulness-based instructors

First, I want to say that there is nothing wrong with maps. I love maps, and

can pore over them for hours. They are incredibly useful, absolutely essential at

times, and wonderfully pleasurable for some people to contemplate endlessly.

I am one of those people. Such contemplation can lead to great insight. But, as the

saying goes, they are not the territory. This is hugely relevant for teaching MBSR

and other mindfulness-based interventions.

Since all mindfulness-based interventions are based on relatively intensive

training in awareness in the context of a universal dharma framework (and as I

have been asserting here, not different in any essential way from Buddhadharma),

the various maps of the territory of the dharma can be hugely helpful to the MBSR

296 JON KABAT-ZINN

instructor in certain ways. Paradoxically, they can also be hugely interfering and

problematic.

The biggest problem is that not only is the map not the territory, but that it

can seriously occlude our ability as a mindfulness-based instructor to see and

communicate about the territory in any original and direct way—a direct trans-

mission if you will, outside the formal teachings, and thus, an embodiment of the

real curriculum. Our internal map, if we are unaware of it, or strongly attached to it,

can unwittingly impose just such a coordinate system for the patient/participant

that can lead to idealizing a goal to be realized or attained, rather than letting

realization and attainment take care of themselves. Our job is to take care of the

territory of direct experience in the present moment and the learning that comes

out of it. This suggests that the instructor is continually engaged in mapping the

territory inwardly through intimate first-person contact and discernment, moment

by moment, all the while keeping the formal dharma maps of the territory in mind

to whatever degree we may feel is valuable, but not relying on them explicitly for

the framework, vocabulary, or vehicle for working with what is most salient and

important in the classroom in any moment. Some of this will naturally be thought-

based, but a good deal of it will be more intuition-based, more embodied, more

coming out of the spaciousness of not-knowing rather than out of a solely

conceptual knowing. This can be quite challenging unless the formal dharma maps

are deeply engrained in one’s being through practice, not merely cerebral and

cognitive.

For example, in the context of the emotional safety we attempt to establish

within the MBSR classroom, to suggest that a person look directly into the

experience of pain and bring awareness to the sensations in the body, whatever

they are, and simply rest in that awareness without having to do anything brings

the person right into the practice with beginner’s mind. No map necessary. Just

the invitation to look and perhaps see, listen and perhaps hear, sense and perhaps

feel, thus cultivating an exquisite intimacy or familiarization with actual experience

as it is unfolding. Of course, it is a radical act, and huge amounts of support and

guidance are necessary to keep the person engaged in such a practice, even for

the briefest of moments at first, and this is why mindfulness-based interventions

such as MBSR are delivered in a group setting as ‘courses’ over an extended period

of time, for the purpose of letting just such a learning curve and a deepening of

stability and insight develop in a context of total support which is none other than

sangha (Santorelli 1999). In the case of pain, the instructor might, as we often do in

the MBSR classroom to reinforce the participants’ motivation and understanding

of the transformative potential of the mind/body connection, cite recent

supportive evidence, in this case from studies such as those demonstrating that:

(1) Zen meditators show structural brain changes (in terms of cortical thickness)

related to decreased sensitivity to thermal pain in pain-related brain regions using

fMRI (Grant et al. 2010); and (2) that long-term meditators using an open focus of

attention, in other words, putting out the welcome mat for whatever arises in the

field of awareness, what we call choiceless awareness in MBSR, showed reductions

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 297

in self-reported unpleasantness but not of intensity in response to a thermal pain

stimulation (Perlman et al. 2010). Under other circumstances, as part of the

didactic element of MBSR that addresses specific background issues and research

findings relevant to the participants in the program (Kabat-Zinn, 1982; Kabat-Zinn,

1990), we might cite other studies of brain changes seen with MBSR training

(Holzel et al. 2010; Holzel et al. 2011), or of improved quality of life, depression, and

fatigue in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) after MBSR training (Grossman et al.

2010).

It doesn’t take long for novices to the practice of mindfulness to notice that

the thinking mind has a life of its own, and can carry the attention away from both

the bare attending to sensation in the body and from any ability to rest in awareness

with whatever is arising. But over time, with ongoing practice, dialogue, and

instruction, it is not unusual for even novice practitioners to see, either

spontaneously for themselves or when it is pointed out, that the mind indeed

does have a life of its own, and that when we cultivate and stabilize attention in the

body, even a little bit, it often results in apprehending the constantly changing

nature of sensations, even highly unpleasant ones, and thus, their impermanence. It

also gives rise to the direct experience that ‘the pain is not me,’ and thus the option

of non-identification not only with the sensations, but also with any attendant

inflammatory emotions and thoughts that might be arising within the attending

and the judging of the experience. Thus we become intimate with the nature of

thoughts and emotions, and mental states such as aversion, frustration,

restlessness, greed, doubt, sloth and torpor, and boredom, to name a few, which

constitutes the territory of the third foundation of mindfulness, without ever having

to mention the classical map of the four foundations of mindfulness, nor the five

hindrances, nor the seven factors of enlightenment.

For that matter, when we work with people in a medical or psychological

setting, using ‘stress’ and the suggestion that ‘stress reduction’ might be possible

as the core invitational framework, we can dive right into the experience of dukkha

in all its manifestations without ever mentioning dukkha; dive right into the

ultimate sources of dukkha without ever mentioning the classical etiology, and yet

able to investigate craving and clinging first-hand, propose investigating the

possibility for alleviating if not extinguishing that distress or suffering (cessation),

and explore, empirically, a possible pathway for doing so (the practice of

mindfulness meditation writ large, inclusive of the ethical stance of sıla, the

foundation of samadhi, and, of course, prajna, wisdom—the eightfold noble path)

without ever having to mention the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path,

or sıla, samadhi, or prajna.

In this fashion, the Dharma can be self-revealing through skillful and ardent

cultivation via formal and informal practice in the supportive context of dialogue,

inquiry, and skillful instruction, which are themselves all one seamless whole.

We can speak of and reinforce attending to the experience of change and

impermanence since they are self-evident, and develop a collective appreciation of

them through engaging in the dialogues and conversations among the class

298 JON KABAT-ZINN

participants. The law of impermanence reveals itself without any need to reference

a Buddhist framework or lens for seeing it. The same is true for all four noble

truths—perhaps better spoken of as the four realities (Gethin 1998). The same is

true for anatta although this one is trickier and scarier, and needs to be held very

gently and skillfully, letting it emerge out of the participants’ own reports of their

experience rather than stated as a fact. Often it begins with the realization, not

insignificant, that ‘I am not my pain,’ ‘I am not my anxiety,’ ‘I am not my cancer,’ etc.

We can easily ask the question, well then, who am I? This is the core practice of

Chinese Chan (Sheng-Yen 2001), Korean Zen (Buswell 1991; Seung Sahn 1976),

Japanese Zen (Kapleau 1965), and also of Ramana Maharshi (1959). Nothing more is

needed . . . . Just the question and the questioning . . . the inquiry and investigation

into the nature of self, not merely through thought, but through awareness itself.10

In the same way, we can be loving and compassionate as teachers/

instructors/ and guides, and introduce practices to cultivate lovingkindness,

especially toward oneself in times of contraction and mental seizures, as well as

compassion, joy, and equanimity, without any mention of the Four Immeasurables,

or necessary recourse to the classical ways in which these are cultivated. The same is

true for generosity, gratitude, and other positive mental states.

This all is to say that it can be hugely helpful to have a strong personal

grounding in the Buddhadharma and its teachings, as suggested in the earlier

sections. In fact, it is virtually essential and indispensible for teachers of MBSR and

other mindfulness-based interventions. Yet little or none of it can be brought into

the classroom except in essence. And if the essence is absent, then whatever one is

doing or thinks one is doing, it is certainly not mindfulness-based in the way we

understand the term.

This means that we cannot follow a strict Theravadan approach, nor a strict

Mahayana approach, nor a strict Vajrayana approach, although elements of all

these great traditions and the sub-lineages within them are relevant and might

inform how we, as a unique person with a unique dharma history, approach

specific teaching moments in both practice, guided meditations, and dialogue

about the experiences that arise in formal and informal practice among the people

in our class. But we are never appealing to authority or tradition, only to the

richness of the present moment held gently in awareness, and the profound and

authentic authority of each person’s own experience, equally held with kindness in

awareness.

This orientation within mindfulness-based interventions has elements of the

Chan approach of non-doing and non-striving, the so called ‘method of no

method,’ and of the paradoxical ‘Dharma combat’ dialogue and inquiry

mentioned earlier, so characteristic of the lineages of Seng-Ts’an and Hui Neng,

the third and sixth Zen Patriarchs of the Chan tradition in Six and Seventh Century

China (Kabat-Zinn 2010; Luk 1974; Mu Soeng 2004; Sheng-Yen 2001; Suzuki 1956).

All maps are laid aside as an act of love and wisdom, meaning that we no longer

have any attachment to what they portray, and are thus able to exemplify and

embody the essence of the territory of being human in all its dimensionalities,

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 299

while transmitting to others through our direct seeing and honouring of their

intrinsic Buddha nature that there is indeed, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and

nothing to attain . . . the gateway to any authentic attainment. This is all intrinsic to

any mindfulness-based intervention, what we might call its marrow.

How then might we understand the whole question of lineage, especially

the lineage of your patients and clients, because their lineage is very likely to start

with you, their teacher. What do you understand as your own lineage? What

nurtured your dharma practice and understanding early on? What nurtures them

now? Perhaps the dharma in its largest and most universal sense and language,

whatever the particulars of your dharma history, is your lineage. Skillful means

might require that you take responsibility for the whole of it, wordlessly, with

perhaps an interior smile, not of self-satisfaction or secrecy, or attainment of

anything at all, but of delight that the real lineage is formless, and with eyes of

wholeness and a heart of kindness, know that literally everything and everybody is

already the Buddha, already the patriarchs, already the dharma, already your

teacher. You have nothing to do except give it away, and the only way you can do

that is to give yourself away. No charge for this, it and you being already free.

. . . . by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest with the intention

to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge,

because it is here, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich

your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of

awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the

nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is

the mother of intelligence.

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973)

Quote on the last page of the MBSR workbook

NOTES

1. In the present context, to recognize the universal character and applicability of the

dharma, I am using the term with a lower-case “d” except in those very specific

circumstances where it signifies the traditional Buddhist teachings within an

explicitly Buddhist context.

2. From the start, there were times that I thought of what we were doing in the stress

reduction clinic as a kind of guerilla theatre within medicine and healthcare and the

hospital, and in a larger sense, engaging with those universes in an ongoing dance

resembling the martial art of aikido, with its characteristic give and take, entering

and blending, and its unswerving aims of vigilance, groundedness, fluidity, and

appropriate application of focused energy, all in the service of wisdom in difficult

circumstances—the wisdom of non-harming and peaceful resolution of conflicting

interests.

300 JON KABAT-ZINN

3. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (Segal, Teasdale and Williams 2002),

Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (Bowan, Chawla and Marlatt 2011);

Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (Bardacke, forthcoming); Mindfulness-

Based Eating Awareness Training (Kristeller, Baer and Quillian-Wolever 2006);

Mindfulness-Based Elder Care (McBee 2008).

4. I went to work as a research associate and later, post-doctoral fellow in the Anatomy

and Cell Biology Department, in the lab of a fellow named Rob Singer, who is now at

the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I took that job because I needed work, we

had an indirect MIT connection, and, to sweeten the deal, he promised me that I

could also participate in teaching gross anatomy to the first year medical students,

which meant being one step ahead of the students in doing the actual cadaver

dissections. As a yoga teacher and also someone who was interested in what is

calledmaranasatior mindfulness of death, that was a ‘to die for’ experience. And so I

went to work in Rob’s lab. The back story is that I met with Rob originally at the

suggestion of someone I did not know, but who introduced himself as a friend of

one of my brothers, and then proceeded to tell me what I should be doing with my

life, as if he knew and I didn’t, which turned out to be more correct than I would ever

have imagined. His name was Earl Etienne. He was a young full professor of

physiology at UMass Medical School, wise, worldly, a truly amazing being. Many

years later, he showed up at a medical grand rounds I gave on MBSR at the California

Pacific Medical Center. I spotted him in the audience and spontaneously dedicated

the talk to him and publically expressed my gratitude for his essential catalytic role

in my being at UMass in the first place. If I had not already been there, it is doubtful

that MBSR, at least as it is presently configured, would have come into the world. To

me, this is one of an infinite number of examples of the interconnectivity of

emergences, and how empty it is to reify an independent entity that would feel the

need to claim individual credit for any complex emergence. It may be correct as far

as it goes, but it is never the whole story. Perhaps any whole story is so complex it

can never be completely known. Tragically, Earl Etienne died young, several years

later.

5. I thought of it in those terms at the time. Now I am not quite sure what adjective

to use. Secular might do, except that it feels dualistic, in the sense of separating

itself from the sacred; I see the work of MBSR as sacred as well as secular, in the

sense of both the Hippocratic Oath and the Bodhisattva Vow being sacred, and

the doctor/patient relationship and the teacher/student relationship as well.

Perhaps we need new ways of ‘languaging’ our vision, our aspirations, and our

common work. Certainly it is only a matter of ‘American’ in the US. Each country

and culture will have its own challenges in shaping the language to its own heart-

essence without denaturing the wholeness of the dharma.

6. Hospitals are not the only dukkha magnets in society—schools, prisons, and the

military could also be described this way. Now there are growing movements to

bring mindfulness into K-12 education (Burnett and Cullen 2010; Grossman et al.

2010; Kaiser-Greenland 2010), into the military (Jha et al. 2010; Stanley and Jha

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF MBSR 301

2009; Stanley et al. 2011), and into prisons (Menahemi and Ariel 1997, Phillips

2008; Samuelson et al. 2007).

7. Saki Santorelli contributed in profoundly creative and incisive ways to this form of

inquiry in MBSR.

8. Twenty years later, as recounted in his powerful and illuminating contribution to

this special issue, Saki Santorelli found himself facing the institutional dissolution

of the Stress Reduction Clinic. Remarkably, he steered a path through cycles of

chaos, uncertainty, and loss to a new and even more vigorous life, a veritable

phoenix rising out of the ashes. The marvel and gratitude of all of us who cared

about the clinic’s fate and its role in the world is boundless.

9. Here I am using the verb ‘to sit’ as an umbrella term to cover the entire range of

formal and informal practices and the moment by moment experiencing of

anything and everything arising from engaging in the retreat.

10. Studies of MBSR suggest that mindfulness training can influence and modulate

different modes of self-referencing in anatomically distinct networks, one medial,

one lateral, within the cerebral cortex (Farb et al. 2007). Such findings may

ultimately contribute to a richer understanding within psychology of the term

‘self’ and its meanings, and thus a new and deeper appreciation of its functional

expressions and relativistic and dynamical nature. This in itself could transform the

field of psychology.

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